Although L. Frank Baum insisted that his classic “The Wonderful Wizard of OZ” story was merely a modern fairy tale stripped of any unnecessary morality and lessons written for children who were already taught such things in school, historians claim there are many political undertones in the book. Of course, Baum also claimed he was attempting to remove the “horrors” and “blood-curdling incidents” of fairy tales and then included a chapter where hundreds viscous wolves and birds are brutally axed to death by the Tin Man with their rotting corpses lying in piles. So his public commentary on the book should be taken with a grain of salt. The 1939 movie – considered the definitive film version – was made 40 years later, and many of those claimed political icons would have meant as much to it’s audience as an I Like Ike button would mean to us today. There’s still a message in the film, mostly presented in dialog and scenes not in the book – one that takes the book’s theme of self reliance and pushes it deep into secular humanism and, perhaps, even atheism. More »